Ricker turned away from his garrulous neighbor, saw the sea-tinted planet had doubled in size. It was a perfect sphere, without a mark on its surface, a ring of solid hydrogen and helium. A worthless world, thought Ricker; worthless as was half the universe—because the woman in the seat up front had killed a man!

"Molly Borden—Benjamin Adison ..." the sourdough mused, apparently still awed by such infamous company.

"Yep," said Ricker, remembering a line from his last story: "In the flash of a pistol those names became linked forever...." It was odd, he reflected. One was a woman nobody at the trial had ever seen before, the other was a man whose name echoed throughout the spaceways. Benjamin Adison was to stellar travel what Wright had been to terrestrial aviation and in his sixtieth year when, at the completion of his work on planet-warming, he had suddenly become corpus delicti in the perfect telenews story. A stolen secret, a mysterious woman, a person high in the government—it had all the angles. Then Senator Trexel was acquitted, Molly Borden confessed. Now she was journeying to a life sentence on the penal planet.

"Too bad she burned Adison's plans when they trapped her." It was Ricker's self-appointed traveling companion again.

"We lost the resources of four worlds by that little trick," Bill agreed. "The police found enough in the ashes to convince them it was the plans." He smiled to himself slightly, like someone who expected something but wasn't quite sure he could count on it. He was probably the only one in the universe who wondered if those ashes really were the plans. What if they still existed—what if Molly Borden hadn't been working alone after all—what if those plans for an apparatus that could heat a whole planet were in the wrong hands—? Well, it would be a great telenews story at least, worth following this woman all the way from Earth on a hunch....

The Martian began coughing again and Ricker watched him get up, very tall, thin, emaciated. He was typically Martian with his dusty brown face, beaked nose and heavy handsomeness. He walked slowly down the aisle toward the water fountain.

"Funny how Adison's daughter swore she'd seen Senator Trexel leaving her pa's laboratory," continued the sourdough.

"Trexel proved he was somewhere else at the time," said Ricker. "He's got a bad reputation but it's graft—not murder. Dorothy Adison's just a dizzy debutante. She left for a hunting trip immediately after the inquest, couldn't be located for the trial. 

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